Hideo Kojima Believes Long Games Could Be Episodic, What About Death Stranding?

Share This:

Hideo Kojima Believes Long Games Could Be Episodic, What About Death Stranding?

Share

Hideo Kojima believes that longer games will start being replaced by episodic release models in the future, according to an interview he gave to GameStop after giving a keynote speech at Develop 2016. In that interview, Kojima expressed the view that in the future, long video games, movies, and tv shows will not be as long as they are now.

Instead, Hideo Kojima believes that long games and movies and shows will give way to shorter, episodic experiences. While he couldn’t speak for his upcoming game Death Stranding, Kojima’s reasoning behind this is how many morning shows in his native Japan are now only around 15 minutes, rather than the thirty minutes to an hour that television shows elsewhere in the world are.

He also cites the normal two-hour length that most movies roughly are. Kojima also cites an increasing demand for faster experiences, integrating user feedback quicker, and more.

Episodic games experienced a brief resurgence as Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead series and its other games began releasing their content in two-hour episodes rather than a multi-hour game.

Considering the lack of a story mode that some first-person games are shipping with recently, what Hideo Kojima believes may have some credence.

At the same time, there’s also the possibility that he’s wrong. Japanese culture isn’t like the culture of the rest of the world, and some long TV shows like the ever-popular Game of Thrones, which wrapped up its sixth season some weeks ago, manage to attract a large number of audiences. Not to mention that open-world adventure games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Dragon Age: Inquisition that can normally soak up dozens of hours just to explore everything available in each area.

So whatever Hideo Kojima believes, we can’t really decide whether he’s right or not until we see proof of his own thoughts.